Spatial Humanities: Methods & Materials Mapping Nicholson's
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Christopher Donaldson, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, C.J. Rupp, Ian Gregory, Andrew Hardie and Paul Rayson Spatial Humanities, Lancaster University We are a five-year, European Research Council-funded project whose main ambition is to explore how quantitative Spatial Humanities: research tools developed in the fields of Geography and Corpus Linguistics can be adapted to address qualitative research questions in the Humanities. Our work primarily focuses on developing techniques for analysing textual Texts, GIS & Places information, including large corpora of books and manuscripts, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other data-visualization technologies. Methods & Materials GIS is a software-based computer mapping and database management system that allows the user to structure, visualize and explore the geographic information contained in a given text or dataset. Broadly speaking, geographic information consists of two components: a spatial component, such as a set of place names or locations, and a thematic component, which assigns some attribute to those locations. A GIS is a digital tool for bringing these different strands of information together and for analysing correlations between them. Like the other data-visualization technologies we employ—including network diagrams, word clouds and cartograms—GIS is a powerful tool for reducing large datasets to a few salient features and thus for detecting patterns that might otherwise remain hidden. It has thus traditionally been used for quantitative research. Recently, however, researchers have embraced GIS as a key technology for the study of literary cartography. Our project has been driving innovation in this emergent field of research by integrating GIS and other visualization tools to map out the literary history of the English Lake District. The Lake District is an ideal focus for a study in literary cartography because it is a well-defined region whose history has been shaped by an overlapping of verbal and visual representation. One thinks of Wordsworth, of course, but one can also think of an array of writers and artists who have shaped our awareness of the Lakeland’s cultural landscape. The region’s ties with early 20th-century art and literature are particularly notable. These include both famous children’s authors, like Arthur Ransome and Beatrix Potter, as well as major figures of the modernist period, such as Kurt Schwitters, Kathleen Raine and the region’s own twentieth-century laureate, the poet, playwright and novelist Norman Nicholson. Mapping Nicholson’s Network Promoted by T.S. Eliot and praised by Ted Hughes The visualizations we created include GIS-based and Seamus Heaney, Nicholson’s works once radial and kernel density maps as well as word occupied a firm place within the British canon and clouds, bubble charts and circular visualizations. the national curriculum. Since his death in 1987, This combination of cartographic and schematic however, his writings have suffered neglect. In large approaches is significant, because it helps to part, this can be attributed to the commonplace and bring the different dimensions of the dataset into emphatically provincial subject matter with which focus. For example, whereas the radial map Nicholson engaged. A lifelong resident of the small, charts the distribution of Nicholson’s west Cumbrian town of Millom, he stands alongside correspondents around the globe, the kernel late-modernist poets like Jack Clemo and R.S. density map documents both the locations of his Thomas as a writer who shaped his craft through the UK-based correspondents and the volume of close study of the landscape and community in letters he received from each of those locations. which he lived. Similarly, the use of abstract models, such as word clouds and circular visualizations, allows The year 2014 will mark the hundredth anniversary us to represent the dataset in terms of kind and of Nicholson’s birth, and plans (including local proportion by ranking the place-names and festivities and critical biographies) are already in the personal names it contains according to the works. In anticipation of these celebrations, and in number of times they appear. Finally, other Findings & Conclusions order to share in the task of bringing Nicholson’s schematics, such as bubble charts, help isolate works to a larger audience, our team has undertaken and display specific thematic elements in the a GIS-based study of his sphere of influence. This dataset, such as the nationalities of Nicholson’s Creating these visualizations drew our attention study is being conducted in tandem with our non-British correspondents. to a number of indicative spatial patterns, research into the history of tourism in the Lake including the surprisingly global distribution of District—a topic about which Nicholson wrote both the correspondents and the fact that London (the perceptively and extensively. metropolitan centre against which Nicholson, the poet of Millom, defined his literary ethos) is the Using the catalogue of the Norman Nicholson place-name that appears most frequently in the Archive at the John Rylands University Library of corpus. Noticing these patterns has sharpened Manchester, we have completed a preliminary our awareness of the complexity underlying analysis of Nicholson’s readership by creating a Nicholson’s status as a writer who, though series of visualizations to display the geographic emphatically provincial, nonetheless lived and distribution of the people who corresponded with worked in an era of increasing globalization. We him about his works between 1940 and 1987. In were especially intrigued to discover that many total, this dataset comprises 565 letters from more of the non-British correspondents in the dataset than 275 different correspondents including Anne wrote to Nicholson about translations and Ridler, Kathleen Raine and Philip Larkin. critical studies of his works. This latter finding has led us to explore the possibility of creating an international, GIS-based bibliography of Special thanks to Frances Baker, of John Rylands University Library, and to the European Research Council, who funded this research under the Nicholson’s works. EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant ‘Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, places’ (agreement number 283850)..